About Me

Short Bio

Rajiv Ranjan is an Australian-British computer scientist, of Indian origin, known for his research in Distributed Systems (cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things). He is University Chair Professor for the Internet of Things research in the School of Computing of Newcastle University, United Kingdom. He is an internationally established scientist with 260+ scientific publications. He has secured more than $12 Million AUD (£6 Million+ GBP) in the form of competitive research grants from both public and private agencies. He is an innovator with strong and sustained academic and industrial impact and a globally recognized R&D leader with the proven track record. He serves on the editorial boards of top quality international journals including IEEE Transactions on Computers (2014-2016), IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, ACM Transactions on the Internet of Things, The Computer (Oxford University), The Computing (Springer) and Future Generation Computer Systems.

He is one of the highly cited authors (top 0.05%) in computer science and software engineering worldwide (h-index=47, g-index=124, and 12900+ google scholar citations).

32.7% (50 out of 153 papers) of his conference and journal publications in the last 5 years (2013-2018) are in the top 10% (i.e., output in top citations percentile) most cited publications worldwide in computer science.

Since the award of his Ph.D. in 2009, 50% (92 out of 183 papers) of his conference and journal publications have been in the top 25% most cited publications worldwide according to the Scopus SciVal metric.

Since 2009 his conference and journal papers had Field-Weighted Citation Impact of 5.05.

6 research papers written by him are in the top 1% (ranked #2, #77, #142, #254, #358, and #396) of the most cited papers (out of total ~37000 published papers) in the Cloud computing research area since 2010.

7 research papers written by him are in the top 1% (ranked #103, #148, #352, #367, #370, #373, #382) of the most cited papers (out of total ~36000 published papers) in the Big Data research area since 2010.

The IEEE Cloud Computing BlueSkies columns, written by him and co-authored with the advisory board members, are among the most cited papers (#2, #4, #6, #10). During 2014-2019 IEEE Cloud Computing published 280 papers.

He led the Blue Skiessection (department, 2014-2019) of IEEE Cloud Computing, where his principal role was to identify and write about most important, cutting-edge research issues at the intersection of multiple, inter-dependent research disciplines within distributed systems research area including Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, and Edge Computing.

Before moving to Newcastle University, he was Julius Fellow (2013-2015), Senior Research Scientist (equivalent to Senior Lecturer in Australian/UK University Grading System) and Project Leader in the Digital Productivity and Services Flagship of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO – Australian Government’s Premier Research Agency). Prior to that, he was a Senior Research Associate (Lecturer level B) in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW).

Dr. Ranjan has a Ph.D. (2009) from the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, the University of Melbourne. The computing department at Melbourne is currently ranked #13 as per QS World University Rankings by Subject 2015/2016 – Computer Science.

Dr. Ranjan’s research excellence is evidenced by following recognitions and awards.

The IEEE Systems Journal selected his paper for 2019 Best Paper Award of the IEEE Systems Council. This award is given annually to the papers deemed the best among those published in the IEEE Systems Journal during the preceding calendar year.

He was conferred 2018 IEEE TCCPS Early Career Award. This award annually recognizes only one researcher from either academia or industry who has demonstrated outstanding contributions (publications, citations, grant record, community service) to the field of Cyber-Physical System (CPS).

Moreover, he was also conferred 2016 IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing (Middle Career Researcher) in recognition of his research leadership in terms of quality of publications, citations, community service, teaching, research supervision, and grant record.

One of his journal papers has received “2009 Outstanding Paper on New Communications Topic Award” from the IEEE Communications Society, USA.

He received “Best Paper Award” from IEEE HPCC 2013 Conference for his seminal work on extending traditional data analysis algorithms to detect access patterns for massive data processing applications.

The IEEE Systems Journal selected his paper for 2018 Best Paper Award of the IEEE Systems Council. This award is given annually to the papers deemed the best among those published in the IEEE Systems Journal during the preceding calendar year.

2017 Elsevier High Quality Research Paper, G-Hadoop paper (Available at: 10.1016/j.future.2012.09.001) selected by Elsevier for celebrating the Chinese Computer Science Research landscape in the last five years.

In 2011 University of New South Wales conferred “Goldstar Award” recognizing his excellent research outcomes.

“Julius Career Award” was given to Dr. Ranjan by his current employer CSIRO for his exceptional publication record, leadership potential and ability to attract talented Postdoctoral Fellows and Ph.D. Students.

Recently (April 2014), he was judged as one of the 3 finalists for the “2014 ICT Young Professional of the Year Award” (a Nationally Competitive award Administered by Australian Government for recognizing excellent work in the ICT sector).

During 2001-2002, he worked as a software engineer (research intern) on a very prestigious project of Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), India. PRL is a National Research Institute for space and allied sciences, supported mainly by Department of Space, Government of India. In particular, he worked on the project titled “Software Development for Characterisation of Detectors of SoXS payload, and Image Processing and Data Analysis acquired from SoXS mission.” This software was used to analyze the data sent by the SoXS (Solar X-ray Spectrometer) payload of the GSAT-2 satellite.

He is an Australian Citizen (through naturalization), Overseas Citizen of India, and Tier 2 (General) UK migrant visa holder. He was born in a very small village (Hakimpur) located in the Vaishali District of the Bihar State Province of India.

In his field, fully refereed conference publications are also highly valued. Some conferences have acceptance rates below 20%, and many seminal works in his area are published in conference proceedings. In this context, his papers have also appeared in top international conferences including IEEE/ACM International World Wide Web (WWW, Core A+/ERA A*) Conference, IEEE International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP, ERA A), International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB, Core A+/ERA A*), IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS, ERA A), IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC, ERA), and IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing (CCGRID, ERA).